What?
A writer with no deadlines?
Impossible?
Not if you self-publish online.
Writers and deadlines—the words are eternally linked, along with the-check-is-in-the-mail, right?
Wrong!
Publish your own work online, and there are no deadlines.
Look, the deadline is a creature of the printing press: at a certain moment, the press must start, and after it starts, it's expensive to stop it until it's done with its print run.
So everything in the print world is scheduled on the basis of when the press starts. Things happen before, and things happen after, and everything depends on that printing press.
Online, there is no printing press. Your work is never indelibly fixed on paper. It is always changeable, editable, fixable, improvable. So why have deadlines?
Sure, it's good to have a schedule, and there are probably events (other than the start of the printing press) that will affect your work: seasonal events, special days, etc. It's not as though you have no schedule.
But there are no deadlines, and the schedule is only for your convenience.
This holds true only for online self-publishing. If you write for a big-organization website, you will have lots of deadlines and little money, just like in the old paper-and-print world, because big website organizations are modeled on the print tradition...with all the disadvantages for writers that have developed in that tradition.
Dump the deadlines! Publish it yourself—online.
